I also thought it safe to count out Taylor or Tyler, or it could even have been Jason, the beautiful brown-skinned St. Lucian exchange student I’d met in a bar very late and very drunk one night after a Paul Weller concert. Because, while Paul was always going to be a hard act to follow, I think I can be fairly confident that whatever memories Taylor-Tyler-Jason might have tried his best to leave me with that evening, one of them wasn’t going to be a peaches-and-cream-complexioned baby boy. So, after those couple of exemptions, that, I sincerely hoped, was that.

“Excellent work, Sadie, you’ve done brilliantly! That’s stage one complete, I believe.”

It was all very well for Leonard to be so happy but, truth be told, I felt like I’d just gone two rough rounds with Dennis’s hair in a premier kickboxing match. Here’s what the first column on the spreadsheet looked like, although I should say that the footnotes were all in my head and definitely far better left there. A girl needs her pride and, no matter how nonjudgmental and down with the IT crowd he was, I’m not sure Leonard was quite ready for the finer details.

Dan McLaughlin/McLachlan/McKintyre. Offensively good-looking law student who’d had a fight with his offensively good-looking girlfriend and slept with me after a party one night on the off chance of making her jealous. A plan doomed for failure from the start. Obviously.

Tony Simmons. I sat next to him in English Lit. class for a while and accidentally slept with him after a particularly inspiring lecture involving the Brontë sisters. I’m not sure Emily and Charlotte would have approved of my behavior, but no doubt Anne would have been cheering from the sidelines.

Adam Linley. Would-be professional footballer and part-time petty criminal. I’d met him very briefly through a friend of a friend and slept with him after I came home one night and found him waiting outside my hall of residence. He was looking for some pot someone had supposedly given me for safekeeping, which was possibly true and possibly not—almost anyone else’s guess would have been better than mine at that stage. I do recall that when I woke up he was gone, and so was my toasted sandwich maker, possibly in lieu of the nonforthcoming pot. I’d be willing to bet that the probability of him being in jail now was a lot higher than that he was playing center forward for Manchester United.

James Knox. Played double bass in a three-piece jazz band called Soft Knox. Corny, yes, but a very handy clue when it came to remembering the last name of a genuine stranger, charming though he had been. I slept with him after his band played a one-night gig at a pub where I worked in Edinburgh, for one night. The reasons for the second point are definitely related to the first, but I can’t for the life of me remember how.

So there you had it. My conscience was cleared. Razed to the ground, in fact. Those four names or close tries, and in the correct chronological order, as it goes, were the definitive possibilities of Norman’s parentage. Leonard made a few final keystrokes and turned the laptop to face me. The names on the spreadsheet came into sharp focus and I suddenly got the weirdest feeling.